Awesome photo!

Introduce him to game development with Godot engine. I don’t know any specific tutorials, but you should be able to find something on YouTube.

You can also introduce him to the Free Software movement: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM

Check the Historical section.

Those distros are just not being developed anymore, so they are no longer recommended.

Why do you bash Valve but not any other company like Apple, Nvidia etc?

I do. I will never buy anything from those companies.

The distros being removed from this list mostly by requests from maintainers means it’s not actively monitored or researched at all. So by not verifying it you put yourself on a mercy of other people. It will fail, if not already.

What are you talking about? It’s a list made by the Free Software Foundation. What was removed? If some information is incorrect, you should be able to prove it.

That’s because you have to use consoles to even read them. They contain hardware DRM and are far from being ethical.

I don’t know what hardware DRM means, but they use proprietary software, so you are right that they are unethical. I never said they were.

Am I missing something or you’re thinking that starting with least offenders is a good idea?

I don’t know what you mean.

You do. But hey you end up with DRM free games you like so much.

But to get there I have to use unethical proprietary software that I hate so much.

By the way why so you even want games? Aren’t most of them unethical?

Who said I do?

Gog offline installers are also unethical, no?

Of course. This is why itch.io is better than gog.

99% users won’t ever need that. For cases when they do, they can find guides, modify settings or install software that does what they want.

You could make the same excuse for Windows.

Any distro you download can do this exact thing and you wouldn’t know for a long period, unless you spend enough time to compile the whole thing yourself, compare and research.

You don’t have to compile to know this. You can find the list of fully free distros here: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html . Debian removes those blobs too, but it’s not on that list for other reasons.

I consider myself knowledgeable but you surely chose a wrong example to teach people about DRM. Try some denuvo or eac maybe.

That’s DRM too and there are many more examples. Blu-ray also contains DRM. And so do most PC games thanks to Valve. Console games on the other hand usually don’t have DRM when you buy a physical copy.

Whatever that means, users don’t care about it. Compared to others, Valve provides a lot more value in most of their solutions. They are hackable just enough to satisfy most enthusiasts.

I know that most people don’t care about their freedom, privacy or security. Most people use Windows. But this doesn’t stop us from trying to build a better world for ourselves and to try to convince others to care.

Some games on Steam are DRM-free and you can play them without running Steam. That is good, but you still need the proprietary Steam client to download them and Steam doesn’t tell you which games have DRM before you buy them. gog.com and itch.io prove that this can be done better.

That doesn’t mean you can’t control how it works. Most people don’t need sources of their Linux distros to use them as they want.

You can’t easily make changes to a program without the source code or even check what it does. Most people are not programmers, so others study the code and make the necessary changes for them.

It would be cool to have the source, but you wouldn’t expect them to have an official maintained repo since they spend much more resources on actual hardware that needs this distro.

This is not an excuse. What they are doing is unethical. They put themselves in a position of power over their users. Not much different from Microsoft or Apple.

Yeah it seems to also be the only thing that is proprietary in SteamOS too.

I don’t know if that’s true. But the Linux kernel is proprietary as well (just like the one in Arch) - it contains binary blobs without the source code.

Are you clueless or what? There are too many ways to do what you want with SteamOS. You can use offline mode, desktop mode, play pirated games in any mode, install any controller software you like.

I was explaining to you how DRM works and why it’s wrong, since apparently you have no idea. I don’t know why you are listing features that any popular desktop operating system has (even Windows). SteamOS is still proprietary, which makes it unethical.

Finally, install another Linux distro on it, or Windows. But people buy Deck because of SteamOS mostly since it creates the intended (and expected) experience.

If you buy a Windows laptop, you can install any operating system on it too. That doesn’t make Windows ethical.

They are DRM-free. I can send you a copy of those games and you can run them on your computer. Without you having to log in anywhere or install an additional proprietary application. Without anyone verifying anything. Isn’t that amazing?

Can you explain what parts of SteamOS are not controllable in a way that makes it more restricted than Arch, which it is based on?

Valve won’t release the source code and I don’t use it, so it’s hard for me to tell which packages are proprietary and which are not. Steam client for sure is proprietary and it comes with the OS. Arch by default is Free Software (other than proprietary blobs in the kernel) and you can audit what each program does and modify it. With SteamOS you can’t do that, because Valve keeps secrets from you on your own device.

[If the account owns the game - allow user to download and run the game] is a DRM sure… But it’s kind of fair, no?

To play any game you have to install and run the proprietary Steam client and be logged in to an account. Even to play singleplayer games. Even if you bought a physical disc. There are stores that don’t do this: gog.com and itch.io. They provide an optional client for convenience, but you can just download a game’s installer from the website and install it on any PC any time you want. In case of Itch the client is Free Software so anyone can see what it does and modify it.

And that makes it ethical? DRM-free stores exist: gog.com and itch.io for example.

Anything you write should be proprietary by default. So I don’t think you have to add this license to your comments just to achieve your goal. But it makes sense if you also want to give some extra rights to people.

If AI reads your code, but the output is something entirely different, why would that be illegal? Isn’t that the same as a human reading something? I’m curious what the courts will decide, though.

I don’t want to help Microsoft, but some of the arguments made in that article are strange. If AI means the end of software licenses, that means the end of copyright, which is a good thing. When AI gets better, we might be able to feed it leaked or decompiled source code and get something that we can legally use. That’s not the current situation, though. At the moment Microsoft uses libre, copylefted software to improve their proprietary program and that’s bad. But I don’t think we can do anything about it other than telling people to not use it.

Steam (and other parts of SteamOS) is non free software, it can do anything on your system and there is no easy way for you to change that or even know what it does. Valve developers put themselves in a position of power over you. They keep secrets from you on your own device. This in itself is unethical, but they also abuse their users with DRM. How can you say that you have control in this case?

Anti Commercial AI thingy

Just out of curiosity, do you think that licensing your posts under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 makes it illegal to use them to train an AI? If so, why do you think that? I post GPL licensed code online, so I’m interested in this topic.

Steam Deck is a computer, so its users deserve to have full control over it just like their PC or smartphone.

You are correct about Steam client though. Even if they keep the internals closed, the GUI part alone would be worth forking. I wish a chrome-less version would exist.

If people can’t easily modify it, then its developers have power over users. You have to trust that they will not abuse that power, but they already do - with DRM for example.

Their system (and the Steam client) is proprietary, which means you can’t easily see what the software does or change it. If you can’t control the software then you don’t control the device. People deserve to have the 4 essential freedoms. This is why Windows is bad and it’s the same with SteamOS.

Making a proprietary operating system is not the right decision. It’s unethical to take away people’s ability to control their own devices.

People deserve to be able to control their own devices, but you are saying that we should be happy if they can get only some control? Having to run even one program that you can’t control is bad. So I see no reason why I should be happy with that. I see no reason why we should lower our standards and let somebody get away with doing unethical things to us. We can do much better than that. Hurd is irrelevant and we don’t need it. We certainly don’t need to let Valve abuse us.

You are right that the world isn’t black and white, but proprietary software and libre software are incompatible ideas. You can’t have freedom when someone is actively trying to take it away from you. Developers of proprietary software are our enemies and we can’t support them. If we let developers have power over us, they will abuse it. It’s been happening for decades and it will never stop. We need to work on making our society less dependent on non free software, not find ways to sustain our dependence. If you want to run a proprietary game on your system that’s your choice, but we don’t have to pretend that the developer of that game isn’t doing something unethical and that there isn’t an ethical way.

I also don’t think people will take much more abuse, the EU is also pushing back hard against abusive US companies.

Yes, but it’s not good enough by itself. It’s nice that Windows users can now uninstall Edge or whatever, but it’s only in EU and that’s just one of many terrible things Microsoft has been doing to their users. It is a small improvement and I’m glad they are doing something (other than spending lots of money on funding free software projects every year), but the law is not enough.

We will keep enough freedom. It’s a gradient.

But you are not just proposing a journey to freedom. You are proposing that we should accept proprietary software and praise companies that develop it, because it will somehow give us more freedom in the future. You want us to support the same type of abuse that we need to get away from.

I get that proprietary software and DRM is a general problem, and Steam is part of that problem, but completely getting rid of that is simply a battle for another time, further in the future. The first battle is to get Windows users abandon their Microsoft/Apple cages, and that’s a win that’s actually within reach now.

The free software movement was started 40 years ago. We can’t just give up now. How many years should we wait? People are only becoming more dependent on computers and our problems keep getting worse. Windows users have been able to abandon it many years ago, but they don’t care about freedom.

Windows also becomes worse by itself, further accelerating the change.

I had the same feeling about 10 years ago, but users of proprietary software are willing to take a lot of abuse. It’s almost impressive how stubborn they are. This includes users of Reddit, Twitter, Apple and others. I don’t think Microsoft will lose any significant amount of users just by abusing them more, and when it comes to features, Windows is improving lately.

That’s important, because running a proprietary OS is still much worse than running some proprietary applications or games on a free OS. A closed OS completely shifts control away from the user, leaving only what the developer allows you to do, and it allows the dev to always push his or her agenda by favoring applications from the same developer, and allowing the developer to establish proprietary APIs and libraries like DirectX which was problematic for the competition for quite some time.

I agree that more freedom is better, but if people don’t understand the end goal, they will keep making the same mistakes. SteamOS is proprietary. Most of the popular GNU/Linux distros have proprietary software in their repositories. On mobile I see people switching from proprietary Android to proprietary Sailfish OS. They just keep falling in the same traps over and over again. Steam is one of those traps. If GNU/Linux became mainstream on desktop today, I have no doubt that it would be a proprietary distro. Then it will be only a matter of time before it turns into something even more proprietary like Windows. Because why wouldn’t it?

A regular user does not understand the ethics behind closed and open source and will never choose a worse free option over a better proprietary one. That either means the free options must become true rivals, or - which is the easier goal for now - the proprietary apps have to run on Linux just as well as people are used to.

That’s why we must explain it to them. Some will listen and others will not, but there is nothing else we can do. We are doing our best to rival the proprietary apps, but it’s a battle we’ve been fighting for 40 years. There will always be something missing and even if there isn’t, it will always be inconvenient to switch from something you already know. Reddit users could switch to Lemmy, but they won’t. If at some point they decide to switch to some other proprietary alternative, that will not fix their problem. It will be only a matter of time before the other company or developer starts abusing them too.

A “war” isn’t being won all at once instantly, but by winning several smaller battles after one another. Which takes time.

I know, but if we make compromises on our freedom, we will never keep it. The companies that make proprietary software will not let us. They could make money from developing libre software instead, but they don’t have to, because our society thinks non free software is fine.

I wasn’t disregarding Valve’s contributions to free software. I’m glad to hear that they have contributed so much and I would like to read more about them if you have the links. They deserve to be praised for that, but it doesn’t cancel out all the bad things that they’ve been doing for many years. Microsoft (for example) contributes to free software too, but at the same time they take away their user’s freedom. Valve deserves criticism for this just like Microsoft deserves criticism for the unethical things that they are doing. It’s awesome that Valve is contributing to a good cause in the last few years, but look how much freedom they have taken away from us.

It seems very important to you that people use GNU/Linux, but if they will be using Steam and other proprietary software, how is that better than them using Windows? They still won’t be able to control their own computers, so what’s the point? The goal isn’t to have people leave one proprietary ecosystem to become trapped in another. The goal is for them to have freedom. I want to live in a free society. The only way to make that happen is to destroy proprietary software. So as long as Valve makes non free software and takes away their user’s freedom with DRM, they are our enemy. Just like Microsoft, Apple, Google and any other company that does the same.

It seems that your goal is to have the most features, but the goal of GNU/Linux and the free software movement is to have freedom - something that Valve doesn’t want their users to have.

PS
GOG’s client is proprietary, which is terrible, but at least it’s not required and there is a libre alternative - Heroic Games Launcher (it works on GNU/Linux too).